We want to make sure our Care Plan clients have the tools to be successful with their websites. That’s why we’ve gone through the process of optimizing all of our Care Plan clients’ websites to ensure they load as fast as possible.
Why it matters:
A faster website delivers a better user experience. No one wants to wait around for a slow website to load, and every fraction of a second helps increase the chances of engaging a user.
Additionally, Google and other search engines prioritize sites that load quickly and efficiently over those that load slowly and/or have large file sizes. Ensuring your site is optimized for performance is a good way to boost (or at least not hurt) your search rankings.
Here are the main changes we implemented on your website:
- We installed WP Rocket, the best caching and performance improvement plugin that we know of. We set up dynamic caching, file optimizations (compressing and combining files), lazy loading images, page preloading, and other powerful tools to speed up the real and perceived time it takes for each page to load.
- We resized, compressed, and/or reformatted any images on the home page to ensure their file size is as small as possible without compromising quality.
- We installed Imagify to automatically resize and compress images you (or we) add in the future.
- We replaced Google reCAPTCHA v3 with Akismet to prevent form spam. While Google reCAPTCHA v3 effectively prevents spam, it is a drag on performance. We did some research and testing, and concluded that Akismet does the job with much less overhead.
These premium plugin licenses (WP Rocket, Imagify, and Akismet) are provided as part of your Care Plan at no additional cost.
Clear your cache! Whenever you publish new content on your site, always clear the WP Rocket Cache after publishing new content.
- Caching essentially saves the content of a webpage in an easily retrievable format, meaning every request doesn’t need to query the full site and database. The new caching tools are much more “aggressive” than the previous one, so it’s important to clear/reset the cache whenever adding new content. Otherwise, your site users may see an old version of the page.
- When you’re logged in, you generally won’t see the cached version. To be extra safe, we recommend also checking the page in an Incognito/Private window to be sure your changes are showing publicly before doing any promotion (e.g. publishing a newsletter or social media post pointing to the new/updated page)
As a note: Caching can sometimes create issues. so please help us review your site carefully, looking for any style or functionality issues. At least 2 team members have reviewed each site since the improvements were made, but we’d like your help to confirm we didn’t miss anything. Sometimes issues show up only in certain browsers.
If you spot any issues, send us a support ticket: [email protected]. We’re here to help!
